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Date:      Thu, 8 Sep 2005 19:43:12 +0400
From:      Pavel Merdine <freebsd-fs@merdin.com>
To:        Eric Anderson <freebsd-fs@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re[2]: Porting from linux to FreeBSD
Message-ID:  <1523969635.20050908194312@merdin.com>
In-Reply-To: <43205660.6040309@centtech.com>
References:  <20050908125653.97583.qmail@web41002.mail.yahoo.com> <43205660.6040309@centtech.com>

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Hello ,

I dont recommend using background fsck in production environment,
because there can be a kernel panic before background fsck finished.
Foreground fsck can last more than half an hour for IDE 300G+ disks.
In my subjective experience, ufs is quite slow comparing to Linux
supported filesystems like reiserfs and xfs. However anybody can
benefit from the FreeBSD kernel stability.
Also, I have to note that ufs seems to be poorly supported despites the
fact this is the only filesystem in FreeBSD. At least I'm aware of two
huge bugs which are not being fixed for years. First bug is in dirpref
(the allocation optimisation) with lack of huge disk support. Another
bug is in inode allocation. That bug causes rare panics on heavily
loaded server (with "dup alloc" message). That bug seems to be fixed
in DragonFly. We are going to review their patch and try it on our
servers. 


Thursday, September 8, 2005, 7:18:56 PM, you wrote:

> Deepak Naidu wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>>    I am thinking of porting my mailserver from fedora
>> 2.6 to freebsd 5.4.  In this regards i have a question
>> regarding chosing the stable and fast filesystem.
>>   
>>   I used reiserfs in fedora due to its faster input &
>> output operation with file size of 1-5 Mb.  Is UFS2
>> stable and fast(does it journalize).  It seems to be
>> slow when untaring a file.
>> 
>> I am thing about XFS, how do i implement it in FreeBSD
>> 5.4 in kernel, how do i get the XFS option during
>> installation(I know for that i have to make own CD,
>> even then).  
>> 
>> 
>> What are my options regarding file syetm in FreeBSD
>> 5.4 considering mailing server performance.

> UFS2 is actually a pretty fast filesystem for most cases.  UFS2 does not
> currently support journaling, however some work is underway by Scott
> Long to implement this.  UFS2 has soft-updates, which keeps meta-data
> consistant in case of system failure (reboots,etc), but does not avoid
> an fsck.  The 5.x series and above has support for background fsck, 
> which allows you to mount the filesystem and begin using it, while 
> background fsck does the checking live.

> There are read-only ports of reiserfs and xfs available for 6.0- and
> 7.0.  The reiserfs code is in the src tree, and the xfs code can be 
> found here:
> http://people.freebsd.org/~rodrigc/xfs/

> I'm sure Craig and Alexander would enjoy the help with the porting of
> XFS.  I'm unsure of the status of reiserfs.  Porting XFS to FreeBSD 
> (full support) would be awesome!

> Eric







-- 
/ Pavel Merdine






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